The present invention relates to a method for the reproduction of a portion inside a contour as a black painted graphic, and more particularly to a graphic reproduction method suitable for outline fonts that express contour lines as formulae.
Outline fonts that express contour as formulae enable processing such as enlargement, reduction and rotation and the like, and have come to be used instead of the dot fonts that have been conventionally used.
However, the largest problem with outline fonts is the processing speed. The problem with respect to this is that more than half of the processing time is taken for the painting of the portion inside the contour.
Conventionally, one of the methods which is used to raise this painting speed is for example, the one disclosed in Japanese Patent Publication No. 53-41017.
As is indicated in FIG. 1, this method comprises a step 10 in which the entire contour of the graphic dot display to be reproduced is stored in a memory, and a step 11 in which this memory is successively scanned in a primary scanning direction (x) and black dot is determined where each of the scan lines and the said contour intersect, and portions between the first black dot and the second black dot are painted black.
In this method, as will be described below, misoperation causes an incorrect graphic to be reproduced.
For example, in the case of the contour indicated in FIG. 5A, only one black dot exists on the scan line for the portion of dots "111" and "112". Because of this, as indicated in FIG. 2, the portion in the x direction from the dots "111" and "112" is mistakenly painted black as indicated by numbers 13 and 14. As the result, the produced graphic differs from the graphic indicated in FIG. 5C, that is to be reproduced.
In addition, the entire contour of the graphic is stored once in the memory and so the number of dots that have to be stored increases and the storage process takes time, making it difficult to increase the processing speed for the reproduction of graphics.